


Go Looking for Trouble (And You’ll Often Find It)

by BethNottingham



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Answers questions of where were Murphy and Emori when all the serious shit was going down, Canon-Compliant, Character Study, Character and Relationship study, Emori-centric, F/M, Spacekru feels, Super brief and non-graphic mentions of multiple corpses, The 100 (TV) Season 7 Speculation, no beta we die like men, one of them is someone we know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:48:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24687919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BethNottingham/pseuds/BethNottingham
Summary: So how DID they discover AnomalyKru's disappearance in episode 4? Emori goes looking for Echo because she thinks she might be able to help Raven get through her feelings from Episode 3. Spoiler-heavy and full of gratuitous callbacks to other episodes, characters etc.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake & Emori, Echo & Emori (the 100), Echo & Raven Reyes, Emori & Raven Reyes, Emori/John Murphy (The 100), Eric Jackson/Nathan Miller
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Go Looking for Trouble (And You’ll Often Find It)

Bellamy had a lot of talents, Emori groused to herself as she carefully wove her way through the unfamiliar forest. He was a powerful leader who inspired people to follow him into danger, he was a crack shot, he was a great substitute big brother when the endless night of space got to be too much for her.

He was a terrible cartographer.

In his defense, she supposed as she rounded the third large rock formation that might have been the one he’d noted on his map (he’d said that it looked like a bust of Julius Caesar, whatever the hell that was) he probably hadn’t expected anyone to need to find him before the group returned. How could he have predicted that in only 48 hours, Clarke would burn down half the palace and plan Russell’s execution, they’d have a(nother) nuclear emergency, Gaia would cancel a century of religion and accidentally disband Wonkru, and Raven would draw a Wanheda-shaped target on her back?

Emori’s teeth found the inner corner of her lips, a nervous habit she’d hoped she’d grown out of, but had discovered over the last few days that she’d just spent six years with far less than her normal reason to stress. She’d tried to talk to Raven – who had uncharacteristically brushed her off – and she knew John had too. He’d had slightly more success getting her to open up (possibly because their friendship was founded on her understanding how much regret had shaped him as a person) but he hadn’t known what to say, and she’d wound up kicking him out too.

What Raven needed, Emori had decided as she lay awake that night, was Big Sis Echo to show her a little tough love; Echo wouldn’t stand for Raven’s tendency to hole up in engineering for days on end when she was in her feelings, and she of all people would be someone Raven could talk to about death and dark deeds.

Besides, she thought sadly, remembering the rundown John had given her of his conversation with Raven last night; Echo would understand Raven being as upset as she was because she didn’t want to be the one to disappoint Monty and Harper.

Was that the “big tree with purple leaves” or was it the other one she could see sticking up above its green neighbors to her left? As soon as everything settled down and they were building their own compound, she had to remember to give Bellamy a crash-course in landmark choosing. She’d wanted to bring Clarke along, since she’d been there as well, but if the blonde hadn’t even been able to get away from her other responsibilities to help with the reactor, then she certainly didn’t have time for a four-hour round trip hike through the woods.

Perhaps she could have given better directions though.

_“I’ve been there before,” John had reminded her as she pulled on her boots that morning. “I could probably get there quicker.”_

_“Yeah, with soldiers to protect you,” she’d responded, “and before you were a natblida and a Prime. I can get myself there and back without being found and killed by any roaming forest cults.”_

_John had rolled over, grumbling unintelligibly into his pillow._

_“Stay here and play god so I have a compound to come back to,” she instructed, not unkindly, as she sat down on the bed to lean over and kiss the top of his head._

_“Hm, yes, I’ll tell all three sets of religious fanatics to put on their get-along shirts,” he sighed. “Maybe I’ll make them throw a country faire as a bonding exercise,” he added with a short as Emori got up and headed for the door. “I saw one in a movie when I was a kid. Might be fun.”_

_“A what now?” Emori checked. He waved his hand._

_“I’ll tell you when you get back.”_

There was a third tree with purple leaves – and its trunk was easily twice the girth of the other two. That had to be the one Bellamy meant.

Although her major mission was just to fetch Echo, she hoped that they’d be close enough to finished with the research that everyone could come back at once. While her new nightblood protected her within the walls of Sanctum, out here it made her as much of a target as her mutated hand had back home. Having Gabriel on the trip back to tell his people to leave the two foreign _natblidas_ alone wouldn’t hurt anything. She’d taken the precaution of dressing in her old non-sanctum clothes, and wearing a handgun in the soft leather thigh holster that Echo had made her on their first night on Sanctum.

None of their little family had been able to sleep that night, thinking about Monty and Harper being young and alive and with them yesterday, and old and dead today. Murphy had disappeared for a few hours while they were waking people up and Jordan was catching everyone up to speed – later he’d reappeared, skin ashen, and she’d gotten out of him privately that he’d gone looking for Monty’s body.

“Kids shouldn’t have to… find their parents…” he’d whispered, and she’d nodded and wrapped her arm around his, intertwining their fingers. He’d put the skeleton in one of the cryochambers, for lack of a better idea, so they could have a funeral later. With everything that had happened in Sanctum, they hadn’t had the chance yet. She wondered if they should bury him on the new planet he’d found for them but never seen, or if he should be sent out into the stars to be with Harper.

Had it really only been two weeks for her since she’d seen them last?

A trail marked on either side with smooth river stones made her audibly sigh in relief. She was nearly there.

Then she saw the body.

Instinctively, she froze, eyes darting around, ears cataloguing every sound. It wasn’t necessarily that she thought the strange-suited person lying sprawled in the road was pulling the same con she and John had favored, but she knew enough about the world and human nature not to trust appearances so easily.

When no traps sprang and the body didn’t move, she approached warily, and gently shook the person. The stiffness and drained-out bullet wounds proved that it was, in fact, quite dead.

Biting the corner of her lip again, Emori jogged down the path to the large tent in the clearing, heart hammering in her chest. This was supposed to be a research trip, not a battle! Out of all of them, Bellamy and Echo were supposed to be the safest, out in the woods with two powerful cult leaders and a large number of firearms.

In hindsight, she supposed as she ripped open the tent flap, that job description didn’t sound nearly as safe as Bellamy had made it out to be.

The tent was empty.

The tent was empty of people, but after she took that in, Emori’s eyes trained in on the details.

The tent was full of obvious clues.

It was messy – less in a disorganized-person-lives-here kind of way, and more in a someone-or-something-knocked-things-over-and-there’s-been-no-one-here-since-to-clean-it-up kind of way. One of the side flaps was sliced vertically – that must’ve been where John snuck in to get Josephine/Clarke – and the canvas lay over some crates as if it had been blown there by a strong wind, or tossed aside by someone entering quickly.

No tracks. The dried leaves from outside were strewn about the hard-packed dirt floor and old rugs of the tent, adding to the idea that there had been some intense weather. If not for the body outside, Emori might have suspected that they moved their research somewhere more stable for that reason alone.

If not for the body, and the dark splatter of blood on one of the rugs.

She wanted to shout Bellamy and Echo’s names, but she restrained herself. Whatever caused all this bleeding could still be nearby, even if they hadn’t thought to remove their comrade’s corpse from the road. Ducking back out, she looked around the campsite more critically. Discarded shell casings glinted in the fallen leaves, and she followed their trail, noting that a clean shot could have been made from it to the corpse on the path. After a few yards, she noticed that the leaves appeared disturbed, like something vaguely human-sized had been dragged, clearing them a little from the ground.

Pulling out her gun and clicking off the safety as Bellamy had shown her when he’d given them all a beginner firearms course on the Ring, she loped quietly along the trail, noting a heavy heel-print in some mud, and a fiber that could have been from Bellamy’s sweater on a thorny shrub. The occasional drop of blood on the fallen leaves and a partial handprint on a rock she had to climb over suggested that at least one person had been injured but still able to move – probably whoever had bled in Gabriel’s tent. The handprint was too small to be Bellamy’s or Gabriel’s – she guessed probably Octavia, but it could have been Echo’s.

She found a fallen log large enough for people to comfortably shelter behind, and noticed quite a few little tubes of metal, suggesting that someone had done just that. But afterwards, the trail went cold. She searched the area, making wider and wider circles, but couldn’t find a single trace that people had ever been here.

“Bellamy!” She shouted, taking a chance. Her voice reverberated back in the silence. “Echo! Gabriel!” She added, hoping that the Children Of weren’t in the area, waiting to bag themselves another _natblida_. “Octavia! Where are you?”

Her own voice bouncing back off a nearby rockface was her only answer.

-0-

“Welcome back, Kaylee Prime,” the Sanctum guard at the shield greeted her before doing a double-take and staring at the body she was dragging on a makeshift sledge she’d put together out of two tree branches and a blanket and smooth plastic matt from Gabriel’s tent.

“Send out patrols,” she ordered, hoping that the man addressing her respectfully as Kaylee Prime meant that he was one of the ones who would take her words as gospel. “There may be others like him – I want them alive.”

“Yes Ma’am!” the guard exclaimed, jumping to attention and fumbling for the walkie on his belt. A true believer, then. Good – with Bellamy, Echo and the only two people she knew who’d ever successfully ran cults all missing in action, she and John were going to need as many of those as they could get.

She’d tried to get the body’s helmet off back at Gabriel’s camp, but accepted quickly that it wasn’t going anywhere without the application of precision tools. She wondered, as she built a conveyance to transport it back to Raven, how the people wearing them were supposed to remove them in an emergency.

Well, she’d thought as she rolled the body onto the blanket, tied a belt under the arms to keep it in place and started back for Sanctum, maybe letting Raven hole up in engineering with a project instead of talking about her feelings was what they were going to be doing after all. At least she’d have something to obsess over other than the deaths of those four miners.

It wasn’t great, but it was something.

Miller and Jackson saw her first. They were on the outskirts of town, having a heated conversation in low, strained voices – something they’d been doing a lot the past two days. Emori had painfully restrained herself from butting in and telling them that after 6 years of building a relationship based on being essentially quarantined together, they probably needed to take a break and have some space for a while. It had certainly worked wonders for her and John.

However, she’d never quite been comfortable with Jackson, since he was one of the doctors who had almost strapped her down and stuck her in a radiation chamber back on Becca’s island, so she chose not to involve herself in his relationship woes.

“What happened?” Miller asked, jogging out to meet her and taking the branches from her so she could rest her arms. She wasn’t sure if he was being kind or just looking for an excuse to exit his argument. She supposed she didn’t care either way, and rubbed her aching arms gratefully.

“He’s already dead,” she said as Jackson tried to look over the body. “I checked. I don’t know who he is or where he came from, but I found the body where Bellamy and the others were supposed to be.”

“They’re gone?” Miller asked quietly, eyes widening and then hardening. “Start from the beginning. Tell me everything.”

“We need to get him to Clarke,” Jackson added as all three of them continued towards the center of town. “She should be in the loop.”

-0-

“So you don’t know whose blood it was?” Niylah asked for the second time. Emori shook her head for the second time, knowing that the Trikru woman was probably hoping for some magical evidence that it wasn’t Octavia’s. Clarke was pacing back and forth, finger twirling in her hair much like Josephine’s had, but harder, pulling at the lock in distress. John had noted that she’d kept the tick even after Josephine’s code had been purged from her – it was probably just as well that she’d decided not to pull him out of the planning meeting he’d been unwillingly conducting.

“It wasn’t Bellamy or Echo who killed this guy, I can tell you that much,” Miller commented. “They’re both better shots. He didn’t die quickly.”

“Unless visibility was bad,” Gaia contradicted. “Emori said there was evidence of a violent windstorm.” Emori nodded confirmation, pulling off her headscarf and mopping the back of her neck with it. It had been six years since she had to hike for hours in rough terrain while dragging something heavy behind her – her stamina was shot.

“Has anyone told Murphy?” Clarke asked, finding Emori’s eyes.

“I will when he gets out of that meeting,” Emori said, shaking her head. “We can’t have ‘Daniel and Kaylee’ reacting publicly to a bunch of total strangers going missing. Has anyone talked to the Children of Gabriel? If these guys are running around the forest, maybe they’ve seen them before.”

“I’ll speak with them when the patrols get back,” Indra responded. “In the meantime, perhaps ‘Kaylee’ should go back to looking a bit more like herself? We don’t need any more religions melting down this week.” Emori supposed she should be offended, but Indra’s dry tone was so clearly directed at Gaia’s near-audibly-rolling eyes that she found it didn’t really bother her.

“Good idea,” she agreed, not hating the idea of trading out her sweaty clothes for something soft and clean. Kaylee’s wardrobe left her with nothing to complain about. As she exited through the back door, she heard the front open, and listened to Jordan and the Sanctum forager report one more armored person in their woods.

So much for getting back to normal, she thought tiredly as she made her way discretely into the least-damaged wing of the palace, into which she and John had moved as Kaylee and Daniel. The servants bowed to her as she passed, and she nodded regally, reaching “her” bedroom and then quickly glancing up and down the hall before ducking into “Daniel’s” next door.

After a long, hot shower – she loved the showers on Sanctum, she had to admit; they were so much nicer than the ones on the Ring – she pulled on one of Kaylee’s dresses and a pair of leggings, and was busy braiding her hair into an intricate bun when Murphy swept through the door.

“When did you get back?” He exclaimed in relief.

“Maybe half an hour ago,” she responded as he wrapped his arms around her. “I got held up.”

“I’m guessing I’m about to hear why Jackson pulled Clarke out of that meeting?” She nodded, then rested her forehead against his clavicle.

“Bellamy and Echo are in trouble,” she responded, suddenly so much more tired than she had been a moment before. “Men in strange suits in the woods – we think they took them and Gabriel and Octavia. Someone’s hurt – I don’t know who but there was blood. Clarke’s gathering intelligence to go after them.” Had it really only been yesterday that she’d had radiation poisoning? Three days ago that she’d had nightblood serum injected into her blood? So many things crammed into so few hours made it seem like they’d been on Sanctum much longer than they had.

“Just another day on the ground, right?” Murphy laughed humorlessly into her hair.

**Author's Note:**

> Come scream with me on Tumblr! @BethNottingham013


End file.
